Between summer season family commitments and some great new developments at Founders Co-op, I missed my 5-month Askablogr update, so I decided to run a little experiment. In previous months I took an active role as community manager, welcoming each new member with a personalized question and looking for ways to unblock members who seemed continue…
I had lunch with a friend yesterday who’s become a big fan of Twitter, and he asked me if my views of it had changed since I set up an account. My response was that, if anything, I’m even more of a skeptic than I was before, but that my reasons are really more personal continue…
Om Malik had a great quote yesterday in his post titled “Can Serendipity Make you Rich?“: “If someone can become the Dolby of the web — remove the noise and give us clear sound — then they are going to make a lot of money. And when I say sound, I mean data that is continue…
A little while back I posted on BATNA, one of the few useful concepts I took away from business school. The topic is on my mind again because I’m currently participating in several unrelated early-stage financings (acting variously as advisor, counterparty and peanut gallery), where a strong BATNA can be the difference between a full continue…
Yesterday’s PE Week Wire included an interview with Marty Pinchinson, a co-founder of Sherwood Partners (a.k.a. “the undertaker” for VC-backed companies). The whole interview is great, but a few quotes in particular stuck in my head: “Everyone comes up with this cockapoo about startups. It’s not about being smart. It’s about being around long enough.“ continue…
I first encountered the idea of intermittent reinforcement in my Organizational Behavior (OB) classes at business school, but it’s become a touchstone in my conversations about user experience design and application “stickiness” as well. Pioneered by renowned (and sometimes reviled) behaviorist B.F. Skinner, the core insight is that a behavior that is reinforced intermittently is continue…
Following up on my last post on Solutions in Search of a Problem, today’s post is about the best way to avoid that trap: engaging your prospective customers *before* developing your product. Too many first-time entrepreneurs are unable or unwilling to sell their vision without an actual product to back it up. As a result, continue…
Maybe I’m just cranky because the Seattle weather has been so terrible recently, but I’ve seen a bunch of ideas recently that I would classify as “solutions in search of a problem”. This is frustrating, not just because these aren’t deals I feel comfortable investing in, but also because the founders behind these ideas are continue…
I thought I was paying attention to the latest developments in data portability and messaging, but Skydeck is one I missed (thanks Mashable for bringing it to my attention). These guys are taking personal cellphone call records (one of the personal data silos I mentioned back in December as a target for portability) and turning continue…
I’ve written before about the need for visionary founders to break their idea down into achievable chunks, but I was missing a referencable framework for the idea. After serving as a judge in their business plan competition, last night I attended an awards dinner put on by the University of Washington Center for Innovation and continue…